QUICK STUDY

Big Picture

  • Developmental psychology: studies physical, cognitive, social change from womb to tomb.

  • 3 Major Issues: Nature vs. nurture, continuity vs. stages, stability vs. change.

🔹 Prenatal Development

  • Stages: Zygote → Embryo (2–8 weeks) → Fetus (9 weeks–birth).

  • Placenta: transfers nutrients, screens toxins.

  • Teratogens: harmful agents (alcohol, drugs, viruses).

  • End of week 8: ~1 inch, ~1 gram, organs formed (sex organs later).

  • Fetal stage: growth & maturation.

🔹 Newborns & Infancy

  • Reflexes: rooting, sucking, swallowing, grasping, breathing.

  • Protective reflex sets: oxygen, body temperature, feeding.

  • Habituation: decreasing response to repeated stimulation.

  • Brain: born with most neurons; rapid neural growth.

  • Critical periods: language, vision, attachment.

  • Motor sequence: roll → sit → crawl → walk (timing varies).

  • Memory: infantile amnesia before ~3 years.

Attachment

  • Secure = comfort & confidence; leads to healthy intimacy later.

  • Synchrony = emotional back-and-forth attunement.

  • Harlow: contact comfort > food.

  • Ainsworth: secure vs. insecure attachment.

  • Parenting styles (Baumrind): authoritarian, permissive, authoritative (best outcomes).

🔹 Cognitive Development (Piaget)

  • Schemas: mental frameworks.

  • Assimilation vs. accommodation: fit into vs. adjust schema.

  • Stages:

    • Sensorimotor (0–2): object permanence, stranger anxiety.

    • Preoperational (2–7): language, pretend play, egocentrism, theory of mind.

    • Concrete operational (7–11): logic, conservation, math.

    • Formal operational (12+): abstract reasoning, moral thinking.

🔹 Adolescence

  • Puberty: physical, hormonal changes.

  • Brain: pruning unused neurons, frontal lobe matures late, limbic system develops earlier → risk-taking.

  • Egocentrism (Elkind): imaginary audience.

  • Kohlberg’s moral stages: preconventional → conventional → postconventional.

  • Erikson: identity vs. role confusion.

  • Self-esteem (Susan Harter): scholastic, behavior, athletic, peer likeability, appearance = strongest factor.

🔹 Adulthood & Aging

  • Early adulthood: intimacy vs. isolation, peak physical performance.

  • Middle adulthood: generativity vs. stagnation, physical decline, menopause.

  • Late adulthood: integrity vs. despair, memory & immune declines but recognition stable, life satisfaction stable.

  • Marriage: predictor of sexual satisfaction, income, health, happiness.

🔹 Grief & Bereavement

  • Grief = process, not event; personal; affected by culture.

  • Worden’s determinants: who deceased was, attachment, mode of death, history, personality & social variables.